Drop and Hook
What is drop and hook? Drop and hook is a freight model where the driver swaps a pre-loaded trailer at the shipper instead of waiting for live loading or unloading.
Full definition
Drop-and-hook freight is the most operationally efficient model in trucking. The carrier drops an empty trailer, hooks to a pre-loaded one, and gets back on the road in minutes instead of hours. Detention risk drops to nearly zero.
Large fleets dominate drop-and-hook because the model requires trailer pools — owning more trailers than tractors so loaded trailers are always staged at customer sites. Owner-operators rarely access this freight directly.
Walmart, Amazon, and a handful of Tier 1 shippers run almost entirely drop-and-hook. Driver pay on these contracts is usually mileage-based with no detention.